Funding cuts loom after ‘perverse’ downgrading, writes Karen Thornton
TWO of the country’s leading education research centres have been removed from the university premier league.
London University’s Institute of Education said its downgrading from a coveted 5* to 5 in the fifth research assessment exercise was “bizarre and perverse”.
King’s College, its sister institution, suffered a similar fate. The stars in education research have instead gone to Bristol University and University College Cardiff - the latter up from a 4 in the last assessment in 1996.
Since 1986 university departments have been assessed for research quality on a scale from 5* to 1, and rewarded accordingly. The top rating indicates more than half of a department’s research work is of international standard, while a 5 means up to half is.
Next year, around pound;910 million will be distributed based on the assessment exercise. But, with more top-rated departments than ever before, only those with a 5* are guaranteed to get the same as this year.
Professor Geoff Whitty, director of the institute, said the downgrading was likely to lead to cuts in research funding (the institute currently gets some pound;4m a year), and could lead to reductions in its teacher training programme; it has around 1,000 trainees on its books.
“Educationists throughout the world will find this result perverse. There is more first-class research going on here than anywhere else,” he said.
He said the way the assessment worked makes it difficult for a centre as large as the institute to get a 5*. It entered 176.5 researchers, compared with just 22.3 in Cardiff, 42.7 at Bristol, and 46.5 at King’s. But Cardiff and Bristol both entered at least 95 per cent of their department staff, compared with between 80 and 94 per cent of those at the institute.
Professor Martin Hughes, head of Bristol’s graduate school of education, put its success down to a focus on learning and how it can be enhanced in schools, workplaces and universities. “It’s helped us feel as if everybody’s pulling in the same direction,” he added.
One of the big improvers this year was Homerton College, Cambridge, which has leapt from a 3a to a 5, putting it on a par with the university’s central education faculty, which also moved up a grade to a 5.
